Director plays diplomat for China scenes

OK, John Curran, so they let you make a movie in Shanghai, and all you had to do was take a little advice from the Chinese government? That doesn't sound so bad.

Then again, most of the advice involved "how we would portray certain historical aspects of the story, and those I found to be -- I'll try to be diplomatic here -- it was a pain," Curran says. "It's revisionist to a certain degree, and it's repressive and, to the Western way of thinking, nonsensical."

He adds: "I didn't want to imply that there was a better film that I didn't get to make. We had a lot of battles, and I feel like we won a lot of them."

He's referring to The Painted Veil, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel, in which Edward Norton and Naomi Watts play an expatriate husband and wife. Curran says Norton had been angling for years to make a movie of the adaptation by Ron Nyswaner, who also penned 1993's Philadelphia.

Watts, who previously starred in Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore, signed on, too, and the director jumped right in. "Once I got the script, I read it, and a few months later I was in China."

Curran shot some of the film in Shanghai, where Norton's character, a doctor named Walter Fane, is stationed with the British colonial government. When his wife, Kitty (Watts), has an affair, he accepts a job in a remote village where a cholera epidemic is raging. As retaliation for her betrayal, Walter forces his wife to join him.

"I like the way that the film starts out with two interesting people who can't stand each other, and, little by little, through this experience, this crazy journey, they start to really look at each other anew," Curran says. "I guess it was really the spark and crackle of that friction that interested me more than anything.

The Painted Veil's other love story, maybe, is Curran's ode to a rapidly industrializing China. "I think there's an element of China that wants to preserve its past, but ... things move quickly. I wanted to go photograph a film in a part of China that might no longer be there." Ultimately, he says, "I got to go shoot it through a romantic prism, and that was great."

Much of The Painted Veil was filmed in the dramatic rural landscape of the southeast Chinese province of Guangxi, where lush valleys and rice paddies are framed by tall, skinny mountains known as karsks.

At first, Curran says, the locals "really embraced us, and we used a lot of them as extras. But by the end of it, they were sick of us. They were like, 'OK, you can go now.' Literally, if we had to shoot there another few days, it would have been bad."